The Festival

(Devils so work
that things which are not appear to men as if they were real.)

I was far from home,
and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard
it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where
the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first
stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the old town
beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road
that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on
toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.

It was the Yuletide,
that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older
than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the
Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people
had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden;
where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every
century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine
were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three
hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as
dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken
another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers.
And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries
that none living could understand. I was the only one who came back
that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor
and the lonely remember.

Then beyond the
hill's crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy
Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots,
wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths
of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central
peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled
and scattered at all angles and levels like a child's disordered blocks;
antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel
roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in
the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting
wharves the sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which
the people had come in the elder time.

Beside the road
at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I
saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly
through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse.
The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard
a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged
four kinsmen of mine for witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just
where.

As the road wound
down the seaward slope I listened for the merry sounds of a village
at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought of the season, and
felt that these old Puritan folk might well have Christmas customs strange
to me, and full of silent hearthside prayer. So after that I did not
listen for merriment or look for wayfarers, kept on down past the hushed
lighted farmhouses and shadowy stone walls to where the signs of ancient
shops and sea taverns creaked in the salt breeze, and the grotesque
knockers of pillared doorways glistened along deserted unpaved lanes
in the light of little, curtained windows.

I had seen maps
of the town, and knew where to find the home of my people. It was told
that I should be known and welcomed, for village legend lives long;
so I hastened through Back Street to Circle Court, and across the fresh
snow on the one full flagstone pavement in the town, to where Green
Lane leads off behind the Market House. The old maps still held good,
and I had no trouble; though at Arkham they must have lied when they
said the trolleys ran to this place, since I saw not a wire overhead.
Snow would have hid the rails in any case. I was glad I had chosen to
walk, for the white village had seemed very beautiful from the hill;
and now I was eager to knock at the door of my people, the seventh house
on the left in Green Lane, with an ancient peaked roof and jutting second
storey, all built before 1650.

There were lights
inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw from the diamond window-panes
that it must have been kept very close to its antique state. The upper
part overhung the narrow grass-grown street and nearly met the over-hanging
part of the house opposite, so that I was almost in a tunnel, with the
low stone doorstep wholly free from snow. There was no sidewalk, but
many houses had high doors reached by double flights of steps with iron
railings. It was an odd scene, and because I was strange to New England
I had never known its like before. Though it pleased me, I would have
relished it better if there had been footprints in the snow, and people
in the streets, and a few windows without drawn curtains.

When I sounded the
archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear had been gathering
in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my heritage, and the bleakness
of the evening, and the queerness of the silence in that aged town of
curious customs. And when my knock was answered I was fully afraid,
because I had not heard any footsteps before the door creaked open.
But I was not afraid long, for the gowned, slippered old man in the
doorway had a bland face that reassured me; and though he made signs
that he was dumb, he wrote a quaint and ancient welcome with the stylus
and wax tablet he carried.

He beckoned me into
a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed rafters and dark, stiff,
sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past was vivid there,
for not an attribute was missing. There was a cavernous fireplace and
a spinning-wheel at which a bent old woman in loose wrapper and deep
poke-bonnet sat back toward me, silently spinning despite the festive
season. An indefinite dampness seemed upon the place, and I marvelled
that no fire should be blazing. The high-backed settle faced the row
of curtained windows at the left, and seemed to be occupied, though
I was not sure. I did not like everything about what I saw, and felt
again the fear I had had. This fear grew stronger from what had before
lessened it, for the more I looked at the old man's bland face the more
its very blandness terrified me. The eyes never moved, and the skin
was too much like wax. Finally I was sure it was not a face at all,
but a fiendishly cunning mask. But the flabby hands, curiously gloved,
wrote genially on the tablet and told me I must wait a while before
I could be led to the place of the festival.

Pointing to a chair,
table, and pile of books, the old man now left the room; and when I
sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that
they included old Morryster's wild Marvels of Science, the terrible
Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvil, published in 1681,
the shocking Daemonolatreja of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons,
and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab
Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin translation; a book
which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered.
No one spoke to me, but I could hear the creaking of signs in the wind
outside, and the whir of the wheel as the bonneted old woman continued
her silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room and the books and
the people very morbid and disquieting, but because an old tradition
of my fathers had summoned me to strange feastings, I resolved to expect
queer things. So I tried to read, and soon became tremblingly absorbed
by something I found in that accursed Necronomicon; a thought
and a legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness, but I disliked
it when I fancied I heard the closing of one of the windows that the
settle faced, as if it had been stealthily opened. It had seemed to
follow a whirring that was not of the old woman's spinning-wheel. This
was not much, though, for the old woman was spinning very hard, and
the aged clock had been striking. After that I lost the feeling that
there were persons on the settle, and was reading intently and shudderingly
when the old man came back booted and dressed in a loose antique costume,
and sat down on that very bench, so that I could not see him. It was
certainly nervous waiting, and the blasphemous book in my hands made
it doubly so. When eleven struck, however, the old man stood up, glided
to a massive carved chest in a corner, and got two hooded cloaks; one
of which he donned, and the other of which he draped round the old woman,
who was ceasing her monotonous spinning. Then they both started for
the outer door; the woman lamely creeping, and the old man, after picking
up the very book I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew his hood
over that unmoving face or mask.

We went out into
the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly ancient town; went
out as the lights in the curtained windows disappeared one by one, and
the Dog Star leered at the throng of cowled, cloaked figures that poured
silently from every doorway and formed monstrous processions up this
street and that, past the creaking sigus and antediluvian gables, the
thatched roofs and diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes
where decaying houses overlapped and crumbled together; gliding across
open courts and churchyards where the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch
drunken constellations.

Amid these hushed
throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by elbows that seemed
preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and stomachs that seemed
abnormally pulpy; but seeing never a face and hearing never a word.
Up, up, up, the eery columns slithered, and I saw that all the travellers
were converging as they flowed near a sort of focus of crazy alleys
at the top of a high hill in the centre of the town, where perched a
great white church. I had seen it from the road's crest when I looked
at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had made me shiver because Aldebaran
had seemed to balance itself a moment on the ghostly spire.

There was an open
space around the church; partly a churchyard with spectral shafts, and
partly a half-paved square swept nearly bare of snow by the wind, and
lined with unwholesomely archaic houses having peaked roofs and overhanging
gables. Death-fires danced over the tombs, revealing gruesome vistas,
though queerly failing to cast any shadows. Past the churchyard, where
there were no houses, I could see over the hill's summit and watch the
glimmer of stars on the harbour, though the town was invisible in the
dark. Only once in a while a lantern bobbed horribly through serpentine
alleys on its way to overtake the throng that was now slipping speechlessly
into the church. I waited till the crowd had oozed into the black doorway,
and till all the stragglers had followed. The old man was pulling at
my sleeve, but I was determined to be the last. Crossing the threshold
into the swarming temple of unknown darkness, I turned once to look
at the outside world as the churchyard phosphorescence cast a sickly
glow on the hilltop pavement. And as I did so I shuddered. For though
the wind had not left much snow, a few patches did remain on the path
near the door; and in that fleeting backward look it seemed to my troubled
eyes that they bore no mark of passing feet, not even mine.

The church was scarce
lighted by all the lanthorns that had entered it, for most of the throng
had already vanished. They had streamed up the aisle between the high
pews to the trap-door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just
before the pulpit, and were now squinning noiselessly in. I followed
dumbly down the foot-worn steps and into the dark, suffocating crypt.
The tail of that sinuous line of night-marchers seemed very horrible,
and as I saw them wriggling into a venerable tomb they seemed more horrible
still. Then I noticed that the tomb's floor had an aperture down which
the throng was sliding, and in a moment we were all descending an ominous
staircase of rough-hewn stone; a narrow spiral staircase damp and peculiarly
odorous, that wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill past
monotonous walls of dripping stone blocks and crumbling mortar. It was
a silent, shocking descent, and I observed after a horrible interval
that the walls and steps were changing in nature, as if chiselled out
of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the myriad footfalls
made no sound and set up no echoes. After more aeons of descent I saw
some side passages or burrows leading from unknown recesses of blackness
to this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they became excessively numerous,
like impious catacombs of nameless menace; and their pungent odour of
decay grew quite unbearable. I knew we must have passed down through
the mountain and beneath the earth of Kingsport itself, and I shivered
that a town should be so aged and maggoty with subterraneous evil.

Then I saw the lurid
shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious lapping of sunless
waters. Again I shivered, for I did not like the things that the night
had brought, and wished bitterly that no forefather had summoned me
to this primal rite. As the steps and the passage grew broader, I heard
another sound, the thin, whining mockery of a feeble flute; and suddenly
there spread out before me the boundless vista of an inner world- a
vast fungous shore litten by a belching column of sick greenish flame
and washed by a wide oily river that flowed from abysses frightful and
unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean.

Fainting and gasping,
I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan toadstools, leprous fire
and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs forming a semicircle around
the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to
survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring's promise
beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. And
in the stygian grotto I saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar
of flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged out of the viscous
vegetation which glittered green in the chlorotic glare. I saw this,
and I saw something amorphously squatted far away from the light, piping
noisomely on a flute; and as the thing piped I thought I heard noxious
muffled flutterings in the foetid darkness where I could not see. But
what frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting volcanically
from depths profound and inconceivable, casting no shadows as healthy
flame should, and coating the nitrous stone with a nasty, venomous verdigris.
For in all that seething combustion no warmth lay, but only the clamminess
of death and corruption.

The man who had
brought me now squirmed to a point directly beside the hideous flame,
and made stiff ceremonial motions to the semi-circle he faced. At certain
stages of the ritual they did grovelling obeisance, especially when
he held above his head that abhorrent Necronomicon he had taken
with him; and I shared all the obeisances because I had been summoned
to this festival by the writings of my forefathers. Then the old man
made a sigual to the half-seen flute-player in the darkness, which player
thereupon changed its feeble drone to a scarce louder drone in another
key; precipitating as it did so a horror unthinkable and unexpected.
At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with
a dread not of this or any world, but only of the mad spaces between
the stars.

Out of the unimaginable
blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the
tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard,
and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained,
hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound
brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles,
nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings;
but something I cannot and must not recall. They flopped limply along,
half with their webbed feet and half with their membranous wings; and
as they reached the throng of celebrants the cowled figures seized and
mounted them, and rode off one by one along the reaches of that unlighted
river, into pits and galleries of panic where poison springs feed frightful
and undiscoverable cataracts.

The old spinning
woman had gone with the throng, and the old man remained only because
I had refused when he motioned me to seize an animal and ride like the
rest. I saw when I staggered to my feet that the amorphous flute-player
had rolled out of sight, but that two of the beasts were patiently standing
by. As I hung back, the old man produced his stylus and tablet and wrote
that he was the true deputy of my fathers who had founded the Yule worship
in this ancient place; that it had been decreed I should come back,
and that the most secret mysteries were yet to be performed. He wrote
this in a very ancient hand, and when I still hesitated he pulled from
his loose robe a seal ring and a watch, both with my family arms, to
prove that he was what he said. But it was a hideous proof, because
I knew from old papers that that watch had been buried with my great-great-great-great-grandfather
in 1698.

Presently the old
man drew back his hood and pointed to the family resemblance in his
face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that the face was merely
a devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were now scratching restlessly
at the lichens, and I saw that the old man was nearly as restless himself.
When one of the things began to waddle and edge away, he turned quickly
to stop it; so that the suddenness of his motion dislodged the waxen
mask from what should have been his head. And then, because that nightmare's
position barred me from the stone staircase down which we had come,
I flung myself into the oily underground river that bubbled somewhere
to the caves of the sea; flung myself into that putrescent juice of
earth's inner horrors before the madness of my screams could bring down
upon me all the charnel legions these pest-gulfs might conceal.

At the hospital
they told me I had been found half-frozen in Kingsport Harbour at dawn,
clinging to the drifting spar that accident sent to save me. They told
me I had taken the wrong fork of the hill road the night before, and
fallen over the cliffs at Orange Point; a thing they deduced from prints
found in the snow. There was nothing I could say, because everything
was wrong. Everything was wrong, with the broad windows showing a sea
of roofs in which only about one in five was ancient, and the sound
of trolleys and motors in the streets below. They insisted that this
was Kingsport, and I could not deny it. When I went delirious at hearing
that the hospital stood near the old churchyard on Central Hill, they
sent me to St Mary's Hospital in Arkham, where I could have better care.
I liked it there, for the doctors were broad-minded, and even lent me
their influence in obtaining the carefully sheltered copy of Alhazred's
objectionable Necronomicon from the library of Miskatonic University.
They said something about a "psychosis" and agreed I had better get
any harassing obsessions off my mind.

So I read that hideous
chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was indeed not new to me. I
had seen it before, let footprints tell what they might; and where it
was I had seen it were best forgotten. There was no one- in waking hours-
who could remind me of it; but my dreams are filled with terror, because
of phrases I dare not quote. I dare quote only one paragraph, put into
such English as I can make from the awkward Low Latin.

"The nethermost
caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the fathoming of eyes that
see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where
dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held
by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where
no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all
ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes
not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that
gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers
of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great
holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and
things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."